Page:Oregon, End of the Trail.djvu/121

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Transportation

IN the late spring of 1837 a little company of men and women, sent out from Boston to reinforce the four lonely brethren at the Methodist mission station in the Willamette Valley, arrived in the lower waters of the Columbia, after a voyage of ten months by way of Cape Horn and the Sandwich Islands. Near the mouth of the Willamette River they were met by Jason Lee, who had made the journey of 75 miles from the mission by canoe, and with him they paddled up the river to the station. In mid-July two women among the newcomers were united in marriage to Lee and his co-worker Cyrus Shepard. "As the sickly season came on," according to a contemporary record, the newlymarried couples "performed two tours through the country, for the benefit of their health." The first was a ten-days' journey on horseback, southward along the Willamette River, eastward to the headwaters of the Molalla, northward to Champoeg, and back to the mission. Very shortly thereafter they set out on foot "to perform a land journey to the Pacific coast," following a trail some 80 miles long from the valley to the ocean that had been used by Indians and by retired Hudson's Bay trappers. Though they found this route "exceedingly difficult, on account of the abruptness of the ascending and descending, and the numerous large trees that had fallen across it," the party arrived at the Pacific in four days; and the same length of time was required "in crossing the mountains, jumping the logs, fording the streams, and traveling over the prairies" on the return. By the end of August they were back at the Willamette station, "better qualified, from the improvement of their health, to pursue the business of their calling."

Most of the common methods of travel available in the Oregon country a century ago are represented in the above brief narrative—by canoe on the waterways, by horseback in the valley bottoms and level open country, afoot through the mountains and other forested areas over narrow trails cut by Indians and trappers. With the coming of the homeseekers, however, the principal trails were rapidly broadened into roads. Thousands of immigrants in ox-drawn wagons, wi